Alex Strachan: Cable-news coverage hits low in Casey Anthony trial

There are two ways to look at the Casey Anthony murder trial, and neither flatters the 24-hour U.S. cable-news networks — or the audience that tuned in to watch, hour after wearying hour.

One is that Anthony was guilty, that she murdered her own child, Caylee Anthony, and then tried to cover up the crime. In which case, the whole tale is rather sad and squalid, an unspeakable act, impossible to comprehend and impossible to defend.

The other is that Anthony was innocent all along, in which case, thanks to the saturation of 24-hour cable-news coverage, she will forever be the target of suspicion, rumour, innuendo and outright hatred. If, as Anthony and her defence team insists, she had nothing to do with it, then the cable news media have been culpable in tarring an innocent person.

One of the more persistent arguments for cameras in the courtroom is that it somehow educates the viewing public. Most TV viewers, after all, get their law degrees from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

To the extent that viewers learned anything from the Casey Anthony trial, though — the most celebrated, talked-about and obsessed-over TV court case since O.J. Simpson — it’s that, sometimes, a jury of 12 men and women can, and sometimes do, take their job seriously.

The jurors in the Anthony trial decided the prosecution hadn’t met its burden. They decided there was reasonable doubt, and found in favour of the defendant. End of story.

They ignored Nancy Grace, Geraldo Rivera and the baying for blood from the coliseum bleachers. The death of a child, and the perpetrator being called to account, is a matter for the criminal justice system, they seemed to be saying, not centre ring in the 24-hour cable-news circus.

In all the heated TV discussion in the hours and days following Anthony’s acquittal, two factors seem to have gone unmentioned: the ethical, moral and legal definition of “reasonable doubt,” and the fact that the jury deliberated for a mere 11 hours — a blink of an eye in legal terms. An 11-hour jury verdict isn’t just quick: It’s tantamount to saying there was no case. At all.

In one of the more telling post-case assessments in the blogosphere, legal commentator Brian Dickerson, writing for the U.S. progressive liberal website Democratic Underground, laid the blame squarely on Grace and her cable-news brethren. “You do not escape a legal abyss as deep as the one Casey Anthony dug for herself without skilled legal representation,” Dickerson wrote. “And in the United States, such representation is available to only two kinds of criminal defendants — those who can afford to hire the full-time services of a good lawyer themselves, and those whose cases are so celebrated that good lawyers are willing to work on them for little or no fee, in the confidence that their labours will ultimately be compensated in some other way.”

By elevating Anthony “from local obscurity to internationally reviled ‘Tot Mom,’” Dickerson wrote, Grace and the other cable-news crusaders virtually guaranteed Anthony would be given a showy, robust defence team.

This isn’t the first time Grace has found herself in the media spotlight, where showy murder trials are concerned.

Grace was the inspiration for David E. Kelley’s over-the-top cable-news pundit “Gracie Jane,” played by Jill Brennan, in Kelley’s long-running — and Emmy winning — courtroom drama Boston Legal. The CNN Headline News/HLN crusader and former prosecutor has long been a target of those who feel the TV media have no place in stirring up public rage over showy murder trials, where the accused is somehow always guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes remains guilty even then.

Former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, host of CNN’s Sunday-morning show, Reliable Sources, and media commentator for The Daily Beast, has described TV’s handling of the Casey Anthony trial as “an embarrassment,” adding that the sheer volume of coverage of stories “that are basically local tragedies” is indefensible. The rush to judgment, the small-time legal pundits who want to be the next Alan Dershowitz, and an overemphasis on the more sensationalist aspects of a case virtually guarantee that a defendant is convicted in the court of public opinion long before a case reaches a jury.

There must have been a reason why when, during a frenetic flurry of Fox News man-in-the-street interviews about the Anthony trial, one woman exclaimed to the camera, “This is better than Jersey Shore!”

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.